Austin Hall Library

For God's Sake, Think!

In the opening chapter of James Schall's new book, The Order of Things, he describes a delightful New Yorker cartoon by S. Gross, which, though likely unintentional, pretty well sums up what life is all about.

A large cat is depicted as standing upright and walking on his hind legs while pulling behind him a little toy cart on a long string. In the cart at the steering wheel is a little mouse. Behind the cart, however, is another little mouse furiously yelling at the contented mouse behind the steering wheel, "For God's sake, think! Why is he being so nice to you?"

It is the second mouse's cry, "Think!" "For God's Sake!" that captures it all. The cat is being a cat. The  little mouse ought to be able to think, to separate this from that, to identify accurately what each thing is, to see the order of how this thing stands to that thing, to know what it is that cats do. But, he isn't and doesn't. He thinks he is on a joyride. But, the second mouse knows the relation of cats and mice. The rational mouse knows that the cat's goodness, as it relates to mice, is not natural. The cat is being "catlike", but the first little mouse just doesn't get it. He isn't being "mouselike," from our point of view, he isn't being rational.

Schall points all this out and notes that an implicit order is presupposed in the cartoon, and we laugh when we see the incongruity of the scene depicted. But, we notice such incongruity only when we simultaneously see the congruity of things.

It is the second mouse--the rational one--who reminds us that we are commanded to "Think!" But, we are not just to think in some disorderly fashion, but to think "For God's sake!"--that is, by what is the very cause of our being. 

A Supreme Memoir

Finding myself with hours in flight and in airports this weekend, I picked up United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas' recent book My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir. I could not put it down, completing the mesmerizing 289-page autobiography in six hours spread over an eighteen hour period.

The life of Clarence Thomas may not be interesting to those who did not follow the nationally televised spectacle of his Senate confirmation hearings in the fall of 1991. But, for those familiar with that low point (at least to that date) in political history, My Grandfather's Son is a must read. This book lays bare a remarkable life and all the events, struggles, and suffering that shaped it.

Alternative Worlds

The words of Fr. James Schall in The Sum Total of Human Happiness hit home to me yesterday as I, in preparation for a task, read a trial transcript of a case on human cloning.

Schall wrote: "All error, and, yes, all sin, I think, arises from our suspecting that what is true might demand our living this truth. Therefore, we avert our attention from the truth in order that we may continue to live as we want. We cannot live this way, of course, when our minds do not support truth so we necessarily erect another, an alternative world for ourselves that prevents us from acknowledging the world that is. All error, as Aristotle implied, can explain itself, give reasons for itself, but only provided that it be allowed the privilege of not telling the whole truth which it suspects but does not admit."

It seems sensible to believe in Schall's "alternative world" theory when reading of the creation of human embryos (human beings at the one-cell stage of human development--like a "toddler" who is a human being at the "toddler" stage of human development) by scientists for the express purpose of harvesting their stem cells, resulting in the embryos' destruction (technically known as somatic cell nuclear transfer). One simply cannot do that without erecting an alternative world in one's mind where what obviously is, is reinterpreted as something it obviously is not, but makes sufficiently opaque the whole truth, for reasons known only to the interpreter.

Common Sense and Scientism

G.K. Chesterton, known  as "The Apostle of Common Sense," has a delightful account of how he discovered sanity in the first chapter of his Autobiography, appropriately titled, "Hearsay Evidence."

Chiding modern scientism, Chesterton candidly admits to having no scientific proof of his own first appearance on earth. Rather, he confesses, he must rely entirely on "mere authority and tradition of the elders," which does, however quite illogically, to be sure, leave him with the "firm opinion" that he was "born on the 29th of May 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington."

Chesterton had nothing against science (properly understood), but he was hinting that the view that only scientific claims are meaningful is self-annihilating and demonstrably false at the level of common sense. Scientism's view that the methods of the natural sciences should be applied to all subject matters is simply silly--but it, along with philosophical materialism, is one of the prevailing presuppositions of the day. 

Chesterton on Tradition and the Sacramentality of the World

In contrast to the modern concept of tradition, G.K. Chesterton wrote: "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. . . . [T]radition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father." Here is my previous post on this subject a number of months ago.

On the sacramentality of the world and the gnostic tendency to look upon the world with contempt, Chesterton wrote: "A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. . . . My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. . . . The world is not a lodging-house in Brighton, which we are to leave because we are miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more."

Why We Need Our Imaginations

One of the great books by one of the greatest modern writers is G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. In it, Chesterton wrote:

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not . . . in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. . . . To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything is a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

Whether Chesterton's observation is strictly true or not is not the point here. As George Weigel notes, it is the sacramentality of life that Chesterton is emphasizing. "To reduce what we can 'know' to what we can rationally 'prove' is dehumanizing--and it's another deprecation of the world and its sacramentality. You can't 'prove' the 'truth' to be found in friendship or love, in intellectual or political or spiritual passion, in Mozart's 'Prague' Symphony, in Rachmaninoff's Vespers--or in hitting the low outside corner with a 90 m.p.h. slider. But these 'truths' exist, and they give life not only its tang but its meaning. To deny the truth of these things is to lock oneself into the prison of a windowless world. It's stifling. And you'll eventually suffocate." (Weigel).

Worldview: "We're Not Pigs and We're Not Angels"

Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins is set in a post-catastrophe America, when the world seems to be coming apart at the cultural seams. The protagonist Dr. Tom More, a hard drinking psychiatrist and lapsed Catholic, has invented a "stethoscope of the soul" that diagnoses and helps treat the inner demons of people. More himself, clinically depressed, is not without his own demons.

The book is somewhat of a black comedy (poking fun at just about every group of people prominent in the aftermath of the 60s) and the product of an impressively creative mind. For example, the protagonist is named after sixteenth-century martyr St. Thomas More, who said "the times are never so bad that a good man can't live in them."

It is Dr. Tom More's ultimate response to the world that has had me thinking for the last couple of days. It is the fundamental nature of the created order and the human being's correct understanding of it for some sense of sanity and rootedness that Percy is addressing when a bewildered Dr. Tom More, in a lucid moment from his hospital bed after a suicide attempt, cries out:

Dear God, I see it now, why can't I see it at other times, that it is you I love in the beauty of the world and in all the lovely girls and dear good friends, and it is pilgrims we are, wayfarers on a journey, and not pigs, nor angels.

In this very brief but intensely coherent exclamation Dr. More affirms the created order, marred though it is, and sees creation as not merely good but the foundation of God's whole gracious plan for his people. We are not pigs and we are not angels. We are human beings and the beauty we see around us in the order of the planet, as well as in the faces of people, witnesses to a meaningful reality and plan beyond us. The world is meaning-full, not meaningless; it is grace-full, and not graceless. When trying to make sense of the world, or gain a proper worldview, one should not begin by looking up, but by looking around.

Is There a Difference Between a Tyrant and a Saint?

As James Schall puts this question in The Order of Things: "That is, are there norms the opposite of which would be also equally acceptable, equally human, equally valid?" If there is no difference between a tyrant and a saint, then no standards, political or otherwise, can be upheld. If there is no definable and objective difference, then whatever we do is justified on the sole grounds that we do it, whatever it may be.

Although the average person often feels uncomfortable with expressing  modern realities in this way, they deny it only in the abstract. Practically speaking, it seems as if what it is to do "wrong" or what it is to do "right" these days is arbitrary. Socrates held, however, and Christ reiterated, that to be a complete human being we must affirm that it is never right to do wrong. A society that has lost its ability to readily discern, affirm, and explain the difference between a tyrant and a saint is "out of order."

Would We Be Better Off If We Were Someplace Else?

Wendell Berry in The Distant Land writes: "And in some of the people in the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else."

Berry believes that this idea (we would be "greatly improved" by being "someplace else") undermines the very notion of self, family, and community. As James Schall notes: "If we wish to improve the world, the place to begin is not "someplace else", with institutions or cultures, but with ourselves, within where we actually live innermost to ourselves." Improving the world, or our own circumstances, begins with ordering our own soul. 

Breakfast and Belloc

So necessary a precursor to what happiness there is to be found in each day, it is hard to trust a man who does not enjoy breakfast.

English essayist, historian, poet, sailor, and traveler Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) made a pilgrimage in the spring and early summer of 1901 from Toul, France to Rome, and he wrote a delightful book about his walk titled, The Path to Rome. As James Schall says, "The Path to Rome is thus not about Rome but about getting there through a Europe that reflects Rome at every step."

Being resolutely "incarnational," that is, he does not separate the soul from the body (which is common today), Belloc writes a great deal about food and wine and sleep in The Path to Rome. Early in his walk, Belloc asks about breakfast: "I would very much like to know what those who have an answer to everything say about the food requisite to breakfast?" He then recalls that Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser drank beer for breakfast with a little bread. He states that in his former army regiment the men drank black coffee "without sugar" along with a piece of stale bread, and as a sailor he ate "nothing for several hours" after rising. He notes of his countrymen:

Dogs eat the first thing they come across, cats take a little milk, and gentlemen are accustomed to get up at nine and eat eggs, bacon, kidneys, ham, cold pheasant, toast, coffee, tea, scones, and honey, after which they will boast that their race is the hardiest in the world and ready to beat every fatigue in the pursuit of Empire. But what rule governs all of this? Why is breakfast different from all other things, so that the Greeks called it the best thing in the world. . .?

Being of English stock, this explains my enthrallment with the foods of breakfast. I am naturally attracted to what my ancestors have been doing for thousands of years--eating. But, what is the rule that governs breakfast--that makes it "the best thing in the world?" If Belloc is right that "a little refreshing food and drink can do so much to make a man," then something traceable to the spirit may be occurring at breakfast tables around the world each morning. The spirit, which cannot be separated from the body, may be refreshed anew each day through the simple process of hunger followed by delight in the good.

I never thought of how much good bacon, eggs, and whole wheat toast could do for the soul until I read Hilaire Belloc.